Campaign staffers from Rick Santorum 2016, Ben Carson 2016, Mike Huckabee 2016, and Ted Cruz 2016 are all confirming that a debate between their four candidates has been scheduled. Unlike the officially sanctioned debates held by the Republican National Committee and televised nationally on networks like Fox News and the Un-Learning Channel, this debate is meant to settle a single, unique issue. One staffer from Santorum’s campaign said of the debate that it “will settle a very important question for conservative voters” and a staffer for Huckabee says that “this debate will help the American public decide who best represents their feelings on a very important topic.” That topic?

“Who here thinks about gay sex more?”

The 2016 presidential election will be the first such election with no incumbent in the last eight years. Though the Republican Party has had no shortage of candidates for the last three elections, some insiders on the Hill believe the glut of candidates winds up creating “extras” of certain types of people. For example, one anonymous congressional aide said that her conservative bosses are “worried that there are now four completely believable people vying for the role of ‘America’s nuttiest theocratic candidate'” and another staffer said “if you give the religious kooks too many choices, they might make the wrong choice.”

Republican State Rep. Tom Thompaulsen told reporters that he floated the idea of this debate to all four campaigns as “a way to settle for the Religious Right which person best represents their desires to turn this country into a Christian Sharia Law state.” Thompaulsen further said that “every Republican voter knows the hallmark of a great president is one who cogitates deeply about gay sex enough to figure out a way to stop it” and that “infrastructure can fuck off when we’re dealing with a gay invasion of our marriages!”

Reporters caught up with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who will be participating in the debate, and asked him why he feels it’s important to secure the anti-gay vote by declaring himself the candidate who thinks about gay sex most. “Well, as you all know there was that recent scientific study done that shows I think about butt sex more than people actually engaged in anal sex at the time,” Cruz said, “well, I don’t think I should have to do much else to prove that I am going to focus on the issues that matter most to average Americans living their lives under the crushing weight of a capitalist system titled so heavily toward the top, but sometimes you gotta skin a cat to fuck a goat. Wait. What?”

Huckabee told reporters outside his favorite eating establishment that he “knows the hand of God will come down during those debates and give me the Holy finger, pointing out who the real, true, crusader for Christ is.” The former Arkansas Governor went on to say that “no president can effectively work while gays are out there acting all equal and stuff.” He said he intends to show in the debate that only he is “ready, willing, and able to suppress the rights of any American for the sake of making Christians feel less icky about something.”

Though no date has been settled on, the participants are reportedly all eager to hold it as soon as possible. “We know our guys have a finite shelf life,” said a Carson staffer. “I mean, this is 2015. Gay marriage is pretty much a foregone conclusion, and it’s been around in Massachusetts and other states so long that the evidence is simply inescapable that no harm is done to society by it being legal at all. So our candidates are working against a tidal wave of public sentiment, and they know that unless they catch fire soon, they’ll be out on their petards by this time next year. We want to capitalize on the momentum we have right now to at the very least secure some more donations from willing dupes — er I mean concerned patriots — to rack-up the campaign coffers for 2020’s run.”

“At the end of the day,” Cruz would later tell reporters, “it comes down to a simple truth. Evangelical, right-wing Christians truly believe that if we don’t have the most stridently conservative, socially antiquated, devout Protestant Christian in the White House, we all burn in the flames of Hell. We are convinced that the End Times are coming, which we actually love because it means we were right all along and Jesus is coming back soon, but we also for some odd reason want to stop it from happening just yet. But we literally believe that the end of the Earth is coming, and it will only be sped up if gays are allowed to feel like humans.

So we mock them. We mock their plight. We disrespect them. We disrespect their right to love and be loved. We lean on our ancient texts that have been translated and re-translated so many times as to be completely worthless as anything other than a collection of stories from the olden times. And at the end of the day, all we really care about is the social issues. We only care about the Culture War. Fuck infrastructure. Fuck foreign policy, and really, fuck domestic policy. Our Christ may have been in favor of helping the poor, but we’re in favor of staying in power, and right now we’re trading on the simpletons’ fears of butt sex to stay in power.”